Golden Venezuela

[Debra Necochea]

Iwalked out of the apartment to the nearest pharmacy, four blocks away, where I found plenty of aspirin, as well as acetaminophen (generic Tylenol) and ibuprofen (generic Advil), in a well-stocked pharmacy with a knowledgeable professional staff that would be the envy of any US drugstore.

Hard as it may be for followers of the US media to believe, Venezuela is a country where people play sports, go to work, go to classes, go to the beach, go to restaurants and attend concerts. They publish and read newspapers of all political stripes, from right to center-right, to center, to center-left, to left. They produce and watch programs on television, on TV channels that are also of all political stripes.

Readers can look at the photos of the rival demonstrations and judge for themselves. Both groups did their best to pull out their faithful, knowing how much is riding on a show of popular support. The stridently right-wing opposition paper El Nacional (2/3/19) carried a photo of the right-wing opposition demonstration:

Trump, who let thousands die in Puerto Rico and put small children in cages on the Mexican border, seems to be an unlikely champion of humanitarian aid to Latin Americans, but the corporate media have straight-facedly pretended to believe it.

The New York Times has run stories (5/15/16, 10/1/16) claiming that conditions in Venezuelan hospitals are horrendous. The reports enraged Colombians in New York, who have noted that a patient can die on the doorstep of a Colombian public hospital if the patient has no insurance. In Venezuela, in contrast, patients are treated for free.

One Colombian resident in New York said that his mother had recently returned to Bogot after several years in the United States, and had not had time to obtain medical insurance. She fell ill, and went to a public hospital. The hospital left her in the waiting room for four hours, then sent her to a second hospital. The second hospital did the same, leaving her for four hours and then sending her to a third hospital. The third hospital was preparing to send her to a fourth when she protested that she was bleeding internally and was feeling weak.

Like any country at war (and the Trump administration has placed Venezuela under wartime conditions, and is threatening immediate invasion), there have been shortages, and products that can mostly be found on the black market. This should surprise no one: During World War II in the US, a cornucopia of a country not seriously threatened with invasion, there was strict rationing of products like sugar, coffee and rubber.

The Venezuelan government has made food, medicine and pharmaceuticals available at extremely low prices, but much of the merchandise has made its way to the black market, or over the border to Colombia, depriving Venezuelans of supplies and ruining Colombian producers. The government recently abandoned some of the heavy price subsidies, which resulted initially in higher prices. Over the past few weeks, prices have been coming down as supplies stayed in Venezuela, especially as the government gained greater control over the Colombian border to prevent smuggling.

Yeah, today on Democracy Now, Amy interviewed an Venezuelan academic in Caracas and behind him was a normal looking cityscene with cars, trucks and bused moving normally on freeway ramps and it all looked so strange, because based on the US media propaganda saturation, I was expecting to see some kind of disaster scene with soldiers gunning down starving citizens scrambling for the last scraps of bread and the like.

My question to you is the following: If the economic conditions in Venezuela are as bad as you claim, why do you think the US authorities feel it is necessary to worsen them by imposing the sanctions in the first place, and now by increasing the sanctions so dramatically, as they are indisputably doing?

The soldiers involved were rousted out of bed early in the morning and moved to an assembly point three blocks from La Carlota Airbase, a huge base (airport, airstrip and all) in the wealthiest district of Caracas. The troops were given a fake reason for assembly. They realized they had been tricked when who should turn up at the assembly point but Juan Guaid and Leopoldo Lopez, the leader of the most extreme rightwing faction of the old oligarchy and the longtime sponsor of Guaid. These two fine gentlemen left no doubt as to the reason the troops were assembled.

The shooting by the police awoke a Japanese film crew from Tokyo Television, who were staying in the Caracas Intercontinental Hotel, next door to the Carlota Airbase. It is their reporting that I am relying on for this material, along with comments by the soldiers who bolted and raced to the base, as given on-camera to Telesur.

The failure of the US authorities and Guaid to incite a rebellion by the military rank and file, or more exactly the success in inciting such a rebellion, but against Guaid instead of in favor of him, left official Washington routed and visibly demoralized. The Maduro government obviously enjoys widespread support, as any honest journalist cannot help but notice. And as the response of the common foot soldiers made clear.

The rich have their money in Switzerland, Russia, Panama etc, and until recently in the US. The rich, buy their kids 4-5 million dollar apartments in Paris to live in while studying. The rich ARE are are the Boliburgeois.. get with the program!M

Susana, as for your claim about 3 million people having left Venezuela: if you are Colombian with Venezuelan relatives, you should know that 5.5 million Colombians have been living in Venezuela in recent years, people who emigrated there when oil prices were high. Venezuela has served for decades as an escape valve to relieve economic pressures elsewhere in Latin America, especially in Colombia but in Ecuador, Peru and other countries as well. When oil prices collapse, the Venezuelan economy does too, and many return home. That has happened repeatedly, but especially in the devastating years of the 1980s and 1990s.

This is so fake, please say the true venezuela is in a real crisis the economic war is inside venezuela not from outside and the real people who made this conflict began is chavez and the socialist party. Please stop the represion please stop the control of the economy let venezuela be a free country.

And yet, here in Guayaquil, Ecuador, I talk daily with people from Venezuela telling me that it is just as bad as the American press says it is. And these are people from all walks of life, from doctors, lawyers, and engineers to people who had worked unskilled labor. Here, uniformly, all of these people (other than doctors) all of them are scraping by, mainly working very low paying jobs in restaurants.

And yes, the media lying was so intense that I also thought there had to be some explanation: this pharmacy must be an exception. So I checked several other pharmacies. They all had the same products.

You were careful to timestamp your observations, and I appreciate that as being honest. Could it be that news reports were exaggerated then, but things have become worse and that they are as is being told?

Yes, things have become worse because of the extreme economic squeeze play by the US authorities against Venezuela. Unfortunately, this did not start with Trump. Obama had already started it with the absurd claim that Venezuela represented a threat to the security of the United States.

If things were as bad as the media, and you, say they are, why should it be necessary to inflict this much extra pain on the people of Venezuela? Surely the US authorities should not have to create an artificial economic crisis to get the population to rebel?

Yet the Trump gang and its designated puppet Juan Guaido flopped miserably Saturday. They were hoping to get the Venezuelan armed forces to revolt, or at least to desert. Nothing of the sort occurred. A few soldiers deserted, which only served to show that it could be done.

With all due respect, the speculation that the photographs of the crowd could have been doctored seems to come from the grasping-at-straws department. Yes, of course, any photo can be doctored, but if there was any evidence that they had been, we would have heard about it by now.

The Trump gang thought it would be easy: the Venezuelan troops were right on the Colombian border, so desertion would not have been hard. The tiny handful who did, some with their families, served perfectly to make that clear.

In fact, Trump had made it hard not to do what he said. He threatened those who did not follow his orders (i.e., support Guaid as president) with extreme punishments, meaning lengthy prison sentences in Guantanamo or some US super-max, or death in a US invasion like the one in Panama in 1989. And he offered large bribes to those who knuckled under.

It says a great deal about the courage and the integrity of the members of the Venezuelan constitutional government and the Venezuelan armed forces that they ignored both stick and carrot. The whole world, whatever their political opinions, can be proud of the Venezuelans and the way they stood up to an imperial bully.

The nurse that took care of my dying Grandmother was from Venezuela. She must have really just liked the food if she decided to leave Venezuela for Peru, considering everything was peachy keen back home.

Is the news media lying about 1.7 million percent inflation last year? That the minimum wage is 18 cents per day? (are you getting paid in Soberanos, living in your Caracas apartment?) That the Bolivar (national currency of Venezuela) has lost 99.99999979% of its value since Chavez took office in 1999?

The pretext for the US invasion was to protect the Peace Corps volunteers in the country. The Peace Corps volunteers had the courage to sign a unanimous statement that they were not threatened at all, and to object to the US military invasion. They were threatened, of course, that this would destroy their future careers, and the CIA, FBI and other agencies made sure that those threats were real.

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